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9. Whenever we use the word God, it has some connotation, some meaning; for instance, when it is said that Christ is God, there must be a meaning in the term God, as well as in the term Christ. Many persons however use this term as if it had only a denotation, a designative force. tion it must necessarily have. connotation? The foregoing paragraphs of this § have been an attempt to show its true connotation. Those who like words in ism will probably call the result, being the Unity of a Personal God, Monotheism. The value of the doctrine of Monotheism

Yet some connotaThe question is, what

has been but dimly seen. It is often supposed to rest on, and to be the expression of, the insight into the fundamental unity of the laws of physical nature, the interdependence of which required the assumption of a single principle of relation between them, and thus to be a doctrine capable of being reached by intellectual processes alone, and, in religion, the natural result or issue of polytheism. The Greeks, it may be said, developed their polytheism, by the aid of science and philosophy, into monotheism; and this is true so far as monotheism rests on a speculative or intellectual basis only; Stoicism was the reduction of moral laws under the same conception. But the emotional element in monotheism has been less attended to. Monotheism was a much earlier and more spontaneous product of the Hebrew people than of the Greek; and among the Hebrews it does not seem to rest upon the development of the intellectual but of the emotional element in their character. They had not a sort of "faculty" for monotheism; but their strong emotional nature, their interest occupied chiefly by the moral side of things, was the

fountain head from which flowed the conception of a single, personal, moral, creator and ruler of the world. Now the great value of monotheism for mankind consists not in the intellectual but in the moral unity which characterises it; it is the unity not of physical but of moral laws, not of laws of nature but laws of volition, which is its chief claim to our regard; the harmonising of the springs of action, of the various conflicting emotions and passions, by subordinating them, not to a mere law without, or with only a prudential, content, but to a supreme and absorbing emotion, the love of God. Henceforth emotion was not opposed with equal right to emotion, passion to passion, as under the Greek polytheism we may see to have been the case, as, for instance, the passions under the protection of Aphrodite to those under the protection of Artemis; see Euripides' Hippolytus; but the unity of man's emotional and passional nature was proclaimed as a duty, and its attainment made possible, by the bringing to light this one master passion, the love of God. It was a real and important advance, a new thing in human development, and at the same time one which was an evolution from, and a deeper discovery of, some hitherto secret springs of his nature. The Hebrew race indeed only gradually attained to conceive of this moral law as one springing from within, not imposed from without; as a law of liberty not a law of bondage; as spirit not as letter; as Gospel not as Law; as a law of love and not a law of terror; as the voice of conscience not a legal ordinance; as spiritual not as carnal; as a law of living faith not of dead works; all which terms are properly significative of one and the same great cardinal distinction.

BOOK I. CH. II. PART V.

§ 44. The religious emotions.

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And it is only in this its true shape as a law of liberty that the moral law has valid and eternal dominion. This was the religion of Christianity as Jesus of Nazareth conceived and preached it; and this it is which makes that religion irreversibly true, the truest of all religions, namely, that in this characteristic it incorporated into its very essence the germ of an infinite development. We live at a time of reawakening; there is a shaking of many foundations; the dawn of a new era had been announced by poets and prophets long before its features could be even dimly seen by analysts; shall we have to pay,-in the new construction which must come,— shall we have to pay for past corruptions by the sweeping away with them of these conceptions of conscience and of God? Surely it is not possible.

§ 45. 1. The two roads spoken of above have been hitherto represented as going in the same direction; but the sameness of direction is not a sameness in all respects. The direction is the same in this respect, that the end desired and tended towards is the same in kind of emotion and of framework. The direction is not necessarily the same in point of situation of its end objectively in time. Moral progress, the first of the two roads, is progress forwards in time both in order of existence, or actual history, and in order of cognition; but religious progress, the second of the two roads, being imaginative, is in this respect to be considered as progress only in order of cognition; its end or object may therefore lie objectively in the infinite distance of past as well as of future time, at the beginning as well as at the end of history. If we suppose, for a moment, the end of the first progress attained, by perfect actual union with

very

God, it may be supposed also then to turn out that we have attained union with what was from the beginning, or existed in past time, as far back in time from the starting point as we should then have gone forwards from it. There is nothing in the nature of the case against this supposition; it is not contradictory, since the religious progress, so far as it is imaginative, is a progress only in order of cognition, and only its realisation is a progress in order of history as well. We shall presently enquire what conceptions or phenomena there are which bear out such a supposition as the present, namely, that the Ideal Object of religion is Eternal, or infinite in existence in time both a parte ante and a parte post, and the same in kind at both ends of the imagined progression, as far as we can reach by thought into infinity either way.

2. The Ideal Object, on such a supposition, would appear at the beginning of the time as the complex of causes out of which, and at the end of it as the complex of effects into which, the world was evolved; to the world it would be at once the agx and the TÉROS TÕS KIVNσEWs, and, in both characters alike, the world itself, implicitly. Take on the other hand the world itself, the intermediary between these two ends, and it is those ends, which are the same end in kind, explicitly; but inasmuch as it moves only forwards in order of history, from beginning to end, and not at the same time backwards, from end to beginning, it exhibits only the progress towards, and not the progress from, the final goal. The progress from the final goal can only be imagined in that part of the order of history which is the order of cognition. In the order of cognition we who follow that

BOOK I. CH. II. PART V.

§ 45. The method of religious thought.

BOOK I. CH. II. PART V.

$ 45.

The method of religious thought.

order, and while we follow it, may conceive that a progress of evolution and disintegration, to speak figuratively, of the Ideal Object has taken place, into

perfect Chaos or what would seem so if we could imagine it; and that then out of this Chaos has been evolved, from a point which we may call creation, the world of history, up to the point at which we, the imagining observers, are standing. But inasmuch

as we cannot imagine the world or the body of the Ideal Object in the infinite future, except by the mere provision that there must and will be such a world or such a body, so also, and a fortiori, in the past we are unable to imagine the steps of disintegration of such a world and such a body, steps by which it advanced to the perfect Chaos which was imagined as the point of reintegration or creation.

3. I have said that we can or may imagine such an evolution and resolution, disintegration and reintegration, as the above; that is, that there is no contradiction involved in it. The Alpha and Omega of the entire progress will be the same in point of nature and one in point of number; different only in point of time of appearing in the same shape. Yet there will and can be no repetition, no cycle of changes, recurring on itself; for this reason, that the movement both forwards and backwards, in both directions, is infinite; the term is taken only by us, the limit is imposed by our present capacities of knowing and feeling. Beyond the Ideal Object, as we at present conceive it, there does lie, as we cannot but think, an infinite time and an infinite progress of modes of consciousness; and however far we could reach, still this would be the case, for time is necessary to, or inseparable from, consciousness,

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